Civ6

On its 25th anniversary, Civilization VI is a reminder of how far the series has come. The lush polygonal worlds and complex system is light years ahead of where the series started with rough-looking sprites and spare mechanics. For the latest iteration of the franchise, leader designer Ed Beach said they looked at the past for ideas toward the future.

“Even before Civilization Vvanilla shipped, we thought about unstacking cities,” Beach said, but the idea was too much at the time when the franchise was already undergoing radical changes. The fifth entry to the series shifted how the game played as it moved from tiles to hex. It added new mechanics with how military units could occupy one tile at a time. Firaxis didn’t want to bite off more than they can chew by adding a new layer.

With Civilization VI, Beach sees a new era of refinement. The team carries over most the improvements from the previous title, including the expansion packs. Religion, espionage, trade routes and archaeology come back, but interestingly enough, “none of the code came over from Civ 6,” Beach said. “We wanted to take advantage of new coding techniques.” Firaxis looked at how each of the systems behaved in Civilization V and they rewrote them.Continue Reading →